I was planning to talk about “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac in class when we discuss modal harmony. Music theory teachers like to bring this tune up as an example of Lydian mode, but I don’t hear it as being in F Lydian. It’s also not clearly in C major, or A minor, or really any …
Continue reading “What I learned from remixing “Dreams” over and over”
I’m working on a podcast episode about “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, a perennial object of debate in the music theory world because no one can agree what key it’s in. This is because the melody doesn’t align with the chords particularly, and neither the melody nor the chords belong unambiguously to any specific key. To …
Continue reading “Twelve remixes of “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac”
A while back, I made a mashup of many different versions of “Nature Boy”, one of the loveliest and weirdest jazz standards. Every so often I go back and add new versions to it. Here’s the latest update. Nature Boy Megamegamix by Ethan Hein I added Jon Hassell’s recording of the tune over the beat from …
Someday I want to write something long about Bach. (Maybe I’ll call it Bach to the Future, ha ha.) I have been slowly building toward it by doing a lot of Bach analysis here on the blog. My pandemic project has been learning movements from the D minor, G minor and E major violin partitas …
Here is what might possibly be my single favorite song in the world:
Do you ever think about how there are several thousand nuclear missiles sitting in silos around the world, ready to launch at a moment’s notice? When I was a kid in the 1980s, that was the main macro-level anxiety lurking behind day-to-day life. Now we worry about different things: the climate, the pandemic, the impending …
As a kid growing up in New York City in the 80s, I loved rap, especially Run-DMC. In my teens, I moved away from it under the pressure of my rockist peers and other white nonsense. I found my way back into rap fandom as an adult, thanks in large part to Missy Elliott’s music …
One of the most significant developments in the past fifty years of popular music is the idea of using existing recordings as raw material for new musical expression. The remix began as a way to make dance versions of pop songs, but it has evolved into an entire new art medium unto itself.
In these troubled times, we could all use some uplift. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” is one of the most uplifting tunes I know.
Glenn Gould thought people should make their own edits of classical recordings. He explains this idea in greater depth here. I read it and thought, challenge accepted!
